This invention pertains generally to the field of boating and marine accessories, and more particularly, to buffers for damping the sound produced in the hull of a boat from the surrounding water.
The motion of the water against the hull of a boat produces a substantial amount of noise within the interior of the boat. Even when a boat is riding at anchor in the water, the lapping of the water against the hull creates sounds of considerable volume inside the boat. This sound is generally most intense below the deck toward the bow of the boat.
This lapping noise is often a problem for pleasure craft that are fitted with sleeping quarters below the deck. V-berths are usually located below deck toward the bow, where the lapping sound is most intense. This makes sleeping on board difficult for many people, particularly those who suffer from insomnia or have trouble sleeping in rooms that are not sufficiently quiet.
The design of conventional pleasure boats does not generally address this problem. It would not be a satisfactory solution to simply manufacture the hull with thick walls, because conventional hull materials such as wood or fiberglass do not have inherent sound absorption properties that are sufficient to make such a design feasible. The required hull thickness in such a design would increase the weight of the craft and reduce the useable space inside the hull to an unsatisfactory degree. Fitting the hull with external sound-deadening structures at the waterline would also be unsuitable, because such structures would degrade the streamline flow and increase the drag of the boat traveling through the water, and thereby adversely affect the speed and handling characteristics of the craft.